The relentless phone calls were one thing, the Facebook messages were another.

Melanie Beacham, of St. Petersburg, Fla., said she fell behind in her car payments after falling ill, and she contacted MarkOne Financial to say she would make a payment when she could.

Still, she kept getting up to 20 phone calls a day from the lender and said it contacted her sister in Georgia and other relatives via Facebook.

Beacham contacted a lawyer, Billy Howard, who filed a lawsuit against MarkOne, asking a judge to ban the company from using social networking sites like Facebook to contact Beacham’s friends about her debt, according to WTSP.com.

“Now Facebook does a debt collector’s work for them,” Howard said. “Now it’s not only family members, it’s all of your associates. It’s a very powerful tool for debt collectors to use.”

Beacham said the incident was embarrassing.

“Nobody should have to go through what I went through,” she said. “I was hurt because I just felt I didn’t need my family going through that. Even though that’s my family, I don’t need them to know my personal business.”